RubyConf 2007 -- Day Two

Nov 3, 2007

9:10am -- I'm not a morning coffee guy but this morning required some chemical assistance to be at the conference on time.

9:40 -- Jonathan Lam is talking about Microsoft's version of Ruby, IronRuby. He showed an XAML XML file used to describe the UI in Silverlight. After 10 years in J2EE, I can honestly say that if you are using a tool to generate an XML file, you haven't done enough work to make it easy to write by hand. Developers hate using proprietary tools.

11:45 -- Evan Phoenix gave a great talk on Rubinius. His thesis? MRI is 125,000 lines of C. IronRuby is 45,000 lines of C#. JRuby is 110,000 lines of Java. In other words, to contribute to the various Ruby VMs, you need to be an expert in another language. This should be minimized; Rubinius is 25,000 lines of C and 13,000 lines of Ruby. Why not implement as much of the Ruby VM in Ruby so that Ruby developers, who are the people that most care, can contribute? A very persuasive argument.

1:45 -- Ed Borasky talked about finding bottlenecks in Ruby 1.8 during his work on the COUGAR Project. He did a fine job explaining profiling and how he found a potential bottleneck. But he didn't fix it and determine how much the fix helped!? What's the point of writing a murder novel if in the end the detective announces "And the murderer is..." and dies? A very disappointing denouement.

3:05 -- Bruce and Rich presented the "dense" Ruby client that InfoEther is building while working for us at FiveRuns. Nice job, guys. Aside from a sound system with a penchant for feedback, the presentation went well.